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The thing about email is it's years behind normal web development in terms of what it's capable of and the coding techniques used.

In normal web development, even though there are a number of different browsers (and more importantly, rendering engines) you have to try to build websites that are able to look and function the same in as many major browsers as possible. And with things like W3 around it helps that there is a 'standard' to follow.

With email, there isn't really a standard. And there are far more email clients out there that all have their own rules on what gets rendered and what doesn't. All of this makes building emails much more difficult since making it look and function the same way in all email clients drastically limits what you can have in the email.

So what do I think emails will look in 2014? Not much different honestly. I don't think there are enough efforts to really bring new innovations to this area of web development and I think it'll be one heck of a task to get enough email clients willing to add 'cool' new features that allow more functionality and design elements in emails. For one, you can't even put videos in emails, which to some extent is a surprise to me still. You basically get text, images and inline styles (and cross-client support is very limited with styles). That's it. So I find it's just a difficult area to be innovative in when you aren't given much to work with.

"Given billions of tries, could a spilled bottle of ink ever fall into the words of Shakespeare?"

That's certainly an impressive addition to emails, but again it's supported in 3 clients currently. Which is why I feel like things like that can't be considered on a large scale for email. Maybe if you have a very 'niche' mailing list, then you could try more advanced and innovative things like that.

To be fair, responsive email design has been making a recent appearance as more and more people are trying to develop email templates that work well on mobile clients as well as desktop clients. In it's own right responsive design is innovative, and so it is nice to see many of those concepts and techniques making it to the email world.

Personally, I always appreciate seeing a beautiful email with clean graphics and a well laid out template, but in the end a plain text email serves me just as well if the content is something I care to read.

"Given billions of tries, could a spilled bottle of ink ever fall into the words of Shakespeare?"